One in Three California Teacher Programs Still Fails the Reading Science Test

What the Report Found

The National Council on Teacher Quality published its June 2026 Teacher Prep Review, the most comprehensive national look at how teacher preparation programs train aspiring elementary teachers to teach reading. Nationally, 53 percent of reviewed programs now earn an A for adequately covering all five core components of scientifically based reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. In 2023, only 26 percent earned an A, so the trend is real.

But 47 percent of programs are still failing on that measure, and 21 percent earned an outright F for teaching multiple outdated or disproven reading practices. NCTQ President Heather Peske did not soften the finding: “This is a form of educational malpractice against new teachers and the students they will serve.”

California’s numbers are worse than the national average. According to EdSource, roughly a third of California teacher preparation programs earned an F on a literacy report card evaluating alignment to science-of-reading standards. This comes after California passed Senate Bill 488, which requires teacher candidates to pass a new literacy performance assessment aligned to science-of-reading principles, and after the state committed more than one billion dollars since 2020 to a birth-through-third-grade literacy pipeline that includes science-of-reading teacher training and mandated literacy coaches.

The contrast with other states makes clear this is a solvable problem. In Mississippi, nine out of ten teacher prep programs earned an A or B. Every one of Colorado’s 17 programs earned an A or B. Twenty-four of Indiana’s 25 programs earned an A. All three states adopted strong policy requirements and followed through at the program level.

The Science Settled This Long Before the Laws Changed

The uncomfortable part of this story is not that California is behind. It is that no institution anywhere has an excuse for still training aspiring teachers to use guessing-based reading instruction. The science has been settled for decades.

Eye-tracking research by Keith Rayner established that skilled readers process nearly every letter on a page; they do not guess from pictures and context. Cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg described the three-cueing approach, which teaches children to guess at unfamiliar words using context clues, pictures, and sentence structure rather than decoding the letters, as “descriptive of how poor readers read.” Emily Hanford’s 2019 investigation Sold a Story made this a national story and kick-started the wave of state reading laws. And yet, in 2026, one in five teacher prep programs nationally still teaches multiple practices the science has rejected, and 20 percent still teach two or more of these practices to aspiring teachers.

For parents of children who struggle with reading, this is the mechanism behind something many have already lived: a teacher who is kind, genuinely trying, but who was never trained in what the science says works. The problem is not with the teachers in classrooms. It is with the institutions that trained them. A law requiring science-of-reading alignment does not reach inside a program’s course materials. Only the program can do that, and too many have not.

If your child is developing their reading skills with difficulty, understanding what evidence-based instruction looks like gives you the right questions to ask. See our complete guide to reading differences and what the science supports.

What This Means for Your Child’s Classroom

The practical implication is direct: if your child’s teacher was trained in a California program, there is roughly a one in three chance that program did not adequately cover science-of-reading instruction. That is not a statement about any individual teacher’s ability or effort. It is a statement about the odds, and it is the reason parents cannot simply trust that “the school has a reading program” is enough of an answer.

There is a tradeoff worth naming. California’s reform efforts are real. SB 488, mandated literacy coaches, and a new performance assessment for teacher candidates are structural changes that will improve the pipeline going forward. But structural changes work forward, not backward, and they depend on implementation at the program level. A law requiring science-of-reading training does not train anyone if the program offering that training still earns an F.

The question worth asking your child’s school is not “do you use phonics?” Most administrators will say yes regardless of what the classroom actually looks like. More useful questions are: What structured literacy program is being used? What training did teachers receive on that specific program? How is classroom implementation being monitored? Those questions distinguish a genuine reading approach from a label change. If your child is already struggling, waiting for institutional reform to reach their classroom is not a plan.